Notes From My Inner Pocket
by PurpleWhales
Summary: Bits and pieces of Sledge's time in combat.
1. Sea Spray

It's the vomit that wakes him up. The gurgle, the splatter, the unusually liquid consistency of it all. The way it runs down his trousers and into his boots. He feels it wriggling, slipping and sliding through his sock and then his toes. It's the smell, the sharp acrid smell that surges up at him even as the liquid drips down. It wraps itself around his head, even underneath the helmet, and forces its way into his nose and mouth. He feels himself suffocating, choking on it, and he claws desperately at his neck and the underside of his chin, as if unclasping the helmet would get him more air, would scare the fumes away, would make it all alright.

Snafu is impervious. To the sight, the smell, the cringing shame others might have felt – all of it. It seems almost a matter of routine. A silent offer of cigarettes (and comradeship) to a fellow marine, a polite but unheard of refusal, a sardonic "Yeah?", and then vomit. All over Eugene's leg and all around his head. It jolts him awake out of a sleep that never really was.

But Snafu barely notices. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth and tenderly slips the pack away into his innermost pocket, the same pocket where Eugene keeps his Bible. For a man who walks by the chance of a bullet and sleeps with a helmet for a pillow, for a man who may fall at any moment on any given stretch of no man's land, that little pocket, tucked close to the heart, as far away as possible from the guns and the knives and the grenades, is a treasure chest. There a man keeps his most precious belongings. There he carries his beloved.

He looks straight ahead and forgets already about Eugene, fumbling beside him, taking off his helmet, clumsy and confused from being pulled so jarringly out of sleep. If sleep is what you call it. He knows his eyes never close for longer than a blink, that he remains sitting upright, that he clutches his gun and clenches his jaw the same as all the other men crammed into the metal box. He knows that he smiles wanly at Bill Leyden and he knows that that when Snafu offers him a cigarette he replies with "I don't smoke". But the words are not his own and he hardly hears himself saying them out loud, so faded and far away. It's only after the mocking "Yeah?", the knowing grin, and the vomit on his shoe that his eyes snap into focus and his mind, off roaming the virginal Alabama fields, crashes back into consciousness. He feels himself drop from the infinite sky. It dumps him unceremoniously into this metal boat, whose jarring thrusts and puttering engines send up bursts of sea.

The water is cold and makes his teeth chatter, but he lifts his face into it and welcomes the spray. It clears the air. It dilutes somehow the tension, the thumping hearts, the muffled sobs of some faceless boy in the back, the vomit seeping into every pore and every crevice of his being. He can hardly comprehend why the air seems heavier and why his throat seems to have closed, but he feels it nonetheless. He feels the fear upon them, the brewing of an animal instinct that may save them once they're on land, that may tell them when to run, when to fire, when to bury their faces into the ground and pray for more time. It's a fine gift to have in battle, more precious than guns or God, but what does he know.

It's his first day of combat and all he knows is that it's filling up the already cramped boat with every breath of every marine. All he knows is that they're drowning in fear and that nothing will help but the cool sea spray. All he knows as they crawl towards the smoking beach is that there's something very wrong about the whole thing. Again, he has no name for it. All he knows is that the ominous tides of Peleliu feel just as soft as the simple Alabama streams that slip to him in sleep. But where there should be flowers there is blood. Where there should be birdcalls there are screams. And while he should be cradling a book, he clutches a gun. There is something very wrong, and it enrages him. He fumes as the gentle tides push him coolly along and he fumes more when they abandon him on the ravaged beach.

The boy who had been brave enough to cry is hit almost immediately. Eugene stares in horror as he crumbles. He lays still, right at the mystical point where water meets land. His face contorts in one final sob. Blood swirls in the water around him, more and more, until it seems he can sail home on that red tide. But the ocean is vast and endless. A few more waves, a few more boats, and the red is gone. The boy is embraced warmly, lifted gracefully into the open sea, far beyond the horizon, and there it sings lovingly to him and envelops him and takes him as its own.

No trace is left on the edge of Peleliu beach. The blue and the greens roll into eternity and the waves dance joyously and the mist sprays triumphantly, as if to say hey, it's all good again. Nothing to be afraid of here. As if to prove that nothing, not the pain or the death or the fear that swamps this tiny island can ever take from its serene enormity, can ever destroy its primeval calm. It murmurs and shouts to all who can hear that there is nothing, nothing that can take away from it that innate peace which a simple boy may find as he reads by the bank of a simple Alabama stream.

But Eugene's gone, lost in the smog and the ruins of the flaming speck of land. The ocean speaks in vain; there is no one left to listen. And then it stops speaking altogether. Peleliu is small and the sea is vast. It forgets about this tiny island and the trickles of red it sends out. There are no more boats coming to disturb its peace. It floats dreamily and hums to itself and hears nothing. Even the smallest whisper of such a large creature is enough to drown out any clashes and any shrieks and any prayers a young boy may sob during his first day of combat.


	2. Animal Instinct

He finds it kind of funny that it's the can he has trouble with. After all he's seen today and all he's done, it's a goddamn can that makes him crazy. Running through the chaos, shells whistling and men falling, under palm trees and Jap fire, the frantic fear that had stifled him in the boat becomes his saving grace. His mind melts away and all the words that had been drilled into him in every second of every day of boot camp drip out onto the sand like just that much more blood. He darts left and right, takes cover and then reemerges, all at precisely the right moments.

He fumbles for prayers, for any form of guidance. Follow the guy in front of you, follow Snafu. Shoot, shoot goddamn it, shoot! The Lord is my shepherd…but they fall away. He has no words. They are stripped away and he is almost glad. The only thing left is a lazy summer day. Fleeting images of Deacon, bicycle rides, and Mary in a sky blue dress. Only that and a steady God, God, God pounding behind his ears. They pass too quickly for him to grasp, and so he lets them flit by as he charges on ahead.

They are images, not quite memories. They are frayed about the edges, like old photographs left and forgotten about. They trample his thoughts to death, and there's a hollow delight in the freedom. The animal instinct grips him hard, and there's no fresh sea to wipe it away. He finds himself a rolling ball of terror and shame and confusion. He plows through the battlefield while greater men fall, simply because he's no longer a man and feels no need to play by their silly rules of life and death. He is made strangely great by fear. There is no rotting stench waiting to leave his bloated body; there are no flies waiting to circle his flesh. He is the lord of the flies, and he is jubilant.

It's not until later that the shame comes. The boy who had been a legend in boot camp, who had shot every target on the spot, who could run the longest distance in the shortest time, who had given Eugene a good-natured hard time for being a virgin and a bad shot, lies bleeding out in a rocky pit. What was his name? Hank? Hardy, was it? He wishes he could remember. But he's still humming from the adrenaline and the world is still blurry. He watches every twitch of Hardy's (Hank's?) lips and every tremor of his limbs with a detached horror. He wants to run over and cradle him and kiss his forehead and tell him that everything's alright. But it's no use, the animal tells him. Hank's gone. Let him be. And so he sits dumbly, trembling and staring, until the body's stopped moving and two corpsmen carry it away. He avoids Hardy's eyes and he passes by.

The action being over (for now), he feels stifled again. He feels trapped in his boots and in the stench that still wafts from them. His feet can't breathe, he thinks hysterically and begins tugging at them frantically.

"You goin' Asiatic?" comes the perpetually sardonic drawl. He looks up to find Snafu observing him lazily, smoking one of his infinite cigarettes. Once in a while he takes a drag or pats his chest to make sure the precious pack is still there, but other than that he lounges about completely still, save for his bug eyes roaming about and taking everything in.

"My feet are soaking wet," Eugene mumbles, biting his tongue to keep from responding with a more truthful "Your fucking vomit's everywhere, asshole."

He might as well have. Snafu's beside him in a flash, shoving the boots into his chest and nearly knocking him over.

"What'cha gonna do in your stockinged feet when the fucking Japs bust through the line?" he spits out with a kind of muffled fury that baffles Eugene. He tries to avoid Snafu's eyes the way he avoided Hank's (Hardy's?), but with the man's face an inch from his own, he has nowhere to run. His eyes are the same bluish green of the deep sea, but somehow they remind him more of a swamp. They are still and murky and even the anger that cracks through his voice is lost before it can reach those hollow pits. Eugene shudders and fixes his gaze downwards at a beetle scurrying beneath the rocks.

Snafu gives him one last shove and stomps back to his side, crushing the beetle along the way. He sits quietly again and smokes his cigarette. Eugene seems to have faded to the back of his mind, and he can't help wondering again if he had dreamt up their interaction. Not likely, he decides, but a nagging feeling of surrealism tugs at his mind.

The rage is gone and Snafu's body collapses. His shoulders curve inward and he slumps back against a rotting log. Even his face becomes looser. His mouth settles into a lazy frown and his forehead unfolds into a childlike calm. Half-lying there such, he looks to Eugene like any of the thousands of battle weary marines scattered about them, save for his terrible, ever- roaming eyes.

Eugene leans back as well and gazes up at the clear blue sky. It's a beautiful summer blue that's too good for this shithole. It's an Alabama blue, he thinks. But that doesn't seem right either. His thoughts carry him off on a winding road, but end up, invariably, before dreams of Deacon running along a stream and magnolias stirring in the twilight breeze. He can just barely recall picking bundles of those flowers in a fit of boyhood love for a pretty girl in a blue, blue dress.

Time drips away and on the heels of this thick late afternoon comes a heavier dusk. But he buries himself in his blanket of memories and tells himself childishly that he'll never come out. He half believes that the musk of summer magnolias must be in the air tonight. But when he takes an eager breath, all he gets is a noseful of vomit and a sharp snap out of his reveries. He is back on Peleliu before he can remember that the sky is the same shade as Mary's dainty dress, the very blue that hovers between dream and sleep. He wakes up before he thinks to call it a languid childhood blue.

Shame comes in waves, Eugene learns quickly. Hardy (the name's Hardy, he's decided) comes back to haunt him, although his death was hours ago. Or was it days? Years? He must have been some monstrous god of another age. He gurgles and twitches and Eugene feels his jaw quiver. Why Hardy? Why not Leyden or Burgin or himself? Why not that bastard Snafu, who fixes his gaze upon him now, as if daring him to break down.

He forces his attention onto the can, attacking it first with his knife, and when that doesn't work, with a variety of sharp pebbles. The can remains stubbornly unopened. He feels his face contorting in helpless despair. The bullets, the blood, the Jap fire, and he's stopped here, by a motherfucking can? He wants to hurl it at Snafu, who sits there smirking at him. Lilliputian, he thinks to himself. Lilliputian. It's a funny word, and he wills the comedy of it to overtake his distress. But no such luck. He slams the can against a rock, hardly realizing that it could explode and splatter over about a million guys. But he needn't have worried. Not even a dent. He bows his head. God, if you're there, he prays with only slight sarcasm, send me a sign. In the form of an opened can.

And there it is. Hovering mere inches beneath his nose – a goddamn motherfucking opened can. He jerks his head up instinctively, as if expecting to see hosts of angels drifting in the clouds. It's only until "Trade ya" that he thinks to look straight forward instead. The can is set in the palm of a hand, connected to an arm, connected to the very rat bastard himself – Snafu Shelton.

"Trade ya," he says again, without a trace of sarcasm or condescension. Okay, maybe a little condescension, but somehow Eugene doesn't mind it as much this time. Snafu's face is without its usual smirk. The lips rest half-open in an almost-grin. The wild bug eyes are sleepy and soft, somewhat tamed. He is inexplicably reminded of magnolias as he stares at this stranger's face and he finds himself wondering for the first time what Merriell Shelton would be like stripped of uniform and war. He wishes he could hold this face in his mind until it's all over and he ships on home.

But Snafu is Snafu, and even in his fits of generosity impatience reigns king. He thrusts the can closer to Eugene's face, as if afraid that he can't see it, as if afraid that this small but sacred act of kindness might be dragged into oblivion and never known. When Eugene still remains a deer in the headlights and makes no move to accept the offer, he simply tosses the opened can onto his lap and snatches the other one out of the boy's hands. He mumbles something about deaf sonavabitches and slashes his knife about with great zeal. In a moment, the can is opened and Snafu is eating.

Eugene continues studying him (stealthily, he hopes), even as he begins to eat. Never mind that this makes him miss his mouth and causes the cold beans to run sloppily down his face. He has more important matters to attend to. He follows Snafu's every movement with his eyes, and when the other man suddenly looks up and moves off with a mumbled "shit I forgot about that guy", Eugene follows without question.

He wishes he hadn't, but somehow he's also glad he did. He's transfixed as Snafu mutilates a dead Jap with the same knife he had used to open his can. Gold teeth are ripped out one by one. They wink despondently in the starless night. He wants to cry or turn away or yell that for God's sake, it's just a little gold and to leave the face the fuck alone. But he sits there bringing beans to his mouth and missing and cramming his head with images of romantic summer nights from back when it was all so simple. And so he gazes on. Snafu doesn't meet his gaze. Even so, he knows that the trickling streams must have swirled into swamps again.


	3. Vomit and Magnolias

At night the eyes disturb him. More so than Hardy or The Boy Who Cried, although they also have a go at it now and then. He would say they haunt him, but that sounds to him a bit melodramatic and unnecessarily angst-y, and he has to believe that he isn't turning into that moron who looks forward to being "haunted" by anything even vaguely out of the ordinary. But yes, he's willing to admit that the eyes disturb him. He tries to drown them out with comforting Alabama memories, but to no avail. They stare at him in the dark, cold and dull. Into the eyes of death, he thinks.

But no. Not exactly, not really. The day he pulls Snafu up from the ground, the day they both miss death by a hairsbreadth, the eyes glow with a frantic electricity. It must be the panic and the sheer vulnerability of the moment. Maybe Snafu sees himself stripped naked before God and hears all the bells of Judgment ringing in his ears. Maybe his head pounds like Eugene's with incoherent profanities and an endless not now, please, not now. A raging love of life (or is it fear of death?) trembling in his ocean of an eye. And yes, there is life too, as he trades cans with Eugene and chuckles about Lilliputian and the utter ridiculousness of it all. It doesn't rage or foam, but still it moves. It trickles and whispers and flows with a secret grace.

These pointless musings of life and death exhaust him and he wishes he could fall into a much needed sleep. He thinks of magnolias blooming in the heat, but the picture is badly faded and no scent comes to mind. Deacon, the stream, the girl in the blue dress! But they have been growing paler as the weeks drag by, and tonight they are all but gone.

From the distance comes the sound of bombardment and explosions. It never ends, Eugene thinks, wondering wearily if he's dreaming it all up again. He can hardly tell anymore. He doesn't know anything anymore. In fact, maybe he knows even less now than he did that first day of combat, trembling in that fucking stifling boat and listening to those piteous sobs. All he knows now is that they move forward and take what's ahead. And if any Japs get in the way, kill them dead. Kill them all fucking dead. War is simple.

He bends down and sniffs his boots. He can give himself no reasons why and he hardly notices his own actions, but sniff his boots he does, casually, easily, like opening a can or strapping a helmet on. Nothing at first, except for the usual smells of blood and dirt and sweat. He sniffs again. Very faintly, a familiar scent comes to him. Vomit. Of course. It amazes him that it still lingers after this long, buried beneath all the newer odors of combat. It also amazes him a little how comforting he finds the smell, and how pleasantly surprised he is to discover it still lurking beneath the surface. He tries not to think about why. Introspection will be the death of them all.

Instead, he turns his attention to Snafu, who is curled up next to him, sound asleep. Beneath the moonless sky, with no cigarette or foul joke hanging in his mouth, he is small and vulnerable. He has come to enjoy studying Snafu's face on nights like this when he can't sleep. He likes to see him like this, soft and boyish. A man-child, Eugene thinks and shudders when he realizes that the same could be said for himself. He wonders what Snafu could be dreaming of, what his eyes see and weep at beneath those serene lids. He tries to conjure up images of Snafu's past life but comes up with nothing. He feels a deep melancholy come over him as he stares at this strange, sad man.

He nudges Snafu with the tip of his boot, and the spell is broken. The walls come up again and Snafu glares at him with wary eyes.

"What?" he snaps, groggy and perpetually impatient.

"I can't sleep."

"Should I sing you a fucking lullaby?" Snafu drawls, already curling up again and settling into sleep. Seeing the vulnerability slip over his face again terrifies Eugene.

"Wait," he whispers hysterically, "I can't sleep."

He can feel Snafu rolling his eyes in the dark and maybe flipping him off, but to his surprise he begins shuffling around, repositioning himself until they're slouching side by side against the gritty rocks. The sides of their boots rub silently against each other like an awkward handshake. They sit in silence for a while until Snafu points suddenly up at the blank sky.

"See that line of stars angling up there?"

No, Eugene thinks. But when he squints, sure enough, there they are. They're dull and blotchy and half hidden behind the smog. Maybe they're not even stars. But who cares. He likes them.

"That's Snafu's pecker," half-sings Snafu with a lewd chuckle.

A flare lights up the night momentarily, sending Snafu's pecker into oblivion. Eugene finds himself smiling in spite of everything, and turns to see if the other man has caught this crude joke as well. But Snafu's lazy grin has fallen away and he stares into the distance pensively. For a split second before the night plunges back into darkness, Eugene thinks he sees the bombardment dancing in Snafu's eyes. He is disturbed again and the silence stretches on. He thinks that he feels Snafu's leg trembling delicately against his, but maybe it's his own leg. Maybe it's all in his head.

"I guess it's true," he says dreamily, almost unaware that he is speaking out loud, "Someone once told me about the Grand Canyon, and seeing it at sunrise, just ten feet away from the edge. Colors you never knew existed, he said. He's right. I guess you never really know it – anything – until you're there, staring down into it. Snafu, we have to go there tomorrow…"

"Shut the fuck up, you idiot," comes the reply. But it comes soft and warm and strangely comforting. He's pretty sure there's a smile somewhere that got lost in the dark.

The flares come more infrequently and the night grows heavier. The silence stretches on. It carries them off. Alabama trickles steadily away. Mary is faceless and the magnolias are dead. All that's left is the scent of vomit wafting gently up and Snafu's eyes peering at him in every corner of the night. That and a tomorrow that hangs uncertainly in the air. We go there tomorrow…tomorrow…but tomorrow is nothing but an abstract. It falls apart before he can reach it. Empty air and nothing more.

Snafu's knee barely brushes his as he shifts around and fidgets. Somehow it's more intimate than anything he's ever known. He's almost certain that if Snafu blinks, he'd hear it. And if Snafu cared to breathe, he'd feel it rattling in his lungs. He wonders what will become of them tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after. He's surprised to feel no dread or fear. There's only comfort in the fact that here, at the end of all things, in this uncertain night when even Alabama has failed him, it is Snafu who he sits by, knee to knee and boot to boot, enveloped together in the scent of vomit and from all sides by the ever flowing sea.

The silence stretches into dawn, sullied only by faint rumblings in the distance. They sit until then. At sunrise they move out.


	4. Margins

Snafu dubs him Sledgehammer the day he learns to smoke. It's a strange sensation, feeling the smoke travel into his lungs. He coughs on it on the way out. Snafu grins broadly and pounds him on the back. In the desperate frenzy of a war zone, though, everything comes quickly or there is death. Brotherhood can be forged in minutes, and guns are fired every millisecond. The best soldier of all is the adapter, and so it only goes that by the end of the march Eugene is an old hand and is smoking like a fiend.

"Got a smoke?"

He turns lazily. The tobacco is relaxing and his mind had wandered off into a half-sleep, as it so often does. He wakes now and sees Snafu beside him and watching him expectantly with a hint of smile on his face, as if they were old friends sharing an inside joke. He knows it's not about the smokes. Snafu has about a trillion packs. But he tosses one over anyway. He is rewarded with a "thanks, Sledgehamma" and a smile a few shades larger than before.

"Sledgehammer," the ever genial Burgin says with relish, "I like it."

"Jesus Christ!" mumbles Bill Leyden in faux disgust.

As Snafu turns to retort, Eugene feels himself slip again into fantasy. But this time, set against the laughter and good-natured swearing of his comrades, it has a kinder tinge.

"Shit 'n' ass…fuck up," he hears behind him, and almost smiles. He takes another easy drag and spews the smoke lovingly into the air. That night he scratches out the elegant, painstakingly perfect "Eugene Sledge" from the first page of his Bible. In its place is a messily scrawled "Sledgehammer".

He has taken to writing things down in his Bible. Notes, he tells Snafu. Just in case. In case what, comes the sneer. In case you write a fucking memoir? Tell them my dick is fucking huge, calls another man he doesn't know. Snafu cackles in the heat. Eugene dips his head to hide a smile and writes on.

Sometimes a quick scribble in the margins is all he has time for. "Don't go Asiatic" and "Gold goes for 30 bucks an ounce" are barely legible, crammed between Psalms. Some days he's too exhausted or too defeated for even words. Those days there are only tally marks and deflated numbers. One hundred and fifteen degrees. How long have they been here? He can't bring himself to count the marks. But once in a precious while, when down time and introspective zeal coincide, he sits and writes for what seems like an eternity. "Opening Cans: How To", for example, spans both Corinthians.

Soon he runs out of margins and moves into the text.

"Saw you readin' last night. Writin' too," Snafu says accusingly one morning when he's in an especially foul mood.

Eugene ignores him. It's always best not to encourage him when he gets like this. But Snafu needs no encouragement. He goes on.

"Not supposed to write shit down, ya know. Gives the Japs valuable intel if they find it."

"Then I won't show it to them," he snaps without turning, oblivious to the knowing grin blooming across Snafu's face.

That night he searches for room in the margins, but finds none. "Don't write shit down" goes over the first verses of the gospel.

"Deacon is dead" is written neatly, in a cold and unmoved hand. He wishes it were shakier. He wishes that he would tremble with emotion. But Deacon had long been but a blank photograph in his mind, an abstract ideal. He is no more real than a vague daydream of what if, what if. He reads the letter again and frowns at the poor dog's fate. He had loved him so much. But still there is no grief, and that is the worst of all.

He forms the last "d" carefully, lovingly. It's the only tribute he can offer. He rubs his stub of pencil thoughtfully and adds below it "Dogs live seven years to every one of ours". That is Snafu's tribute. This is Deacon's tombstone, and it towers above every last pathetic monument man has ever raised.

He doesn't realize how much he's written until he flips through one day looking for the Lord's Prayer and finds in its place a hysterical "Bad germs" written in heavy block letters and scribbled in savagely. He recalls vividly the slosh, slosh, slosh of pebbles in bloody brains. And of course the rotting corpse. Something like rage but steadier drives him ever downwards until they're face to face and he holds the jaw in his hand. He makes the mistake of looking into the eyes. The hollow, unmoving pits, the great death of it all makes his stomach churn with a familiar fear. He knows it all too well.

He staggers back and allows Snafu to lead him gently away, spouting some bullshit about bad germs and getting ill. He doesn't look up, afraid that the corpse's eyes might be on his friend's face. But somewhere between the "No, you shouldn't" and his whining "Why not", he chooses to believe that he need not fear. Snafu's eyes are liquid and his lies the sweetest lullaby.

He thumbs through the pages, looking for any sliver of blank space. He finds none. Determined black ants, marching cold and perfect, have been replaced by a laughably inferior gray scrawl. He closes it up to put it away, but from across the table Snafu snatches it out of his hands and looks through it. We made it Gene, he says with a small smile. We've filled up that goddamn book. He slips it back into Eugene's inner pocket and pats it affectionately a few times. He leans back into his seat and lets his eyes close and his body sway to the unending chug, chug, chug-a-lug of the train.

Eugene watches him sleep and taps at the Bible slowly through his pocket. He can feel his heart beating against it. There's no more to write, he tells himself. They've filled the whole goddamn book. He pulls it out and flips through the pages again, slowly this time. He runs his fingers over them carefully. Lovingly. It isn't a Bible. It hasn't been for a while now. Snafu and him, they've written their own religion. They've made their own god. He chuckles. He likes that.

Snafu fidgets now in his sleep, eyelids twitching and lips curving. Eugene smiles wanly at him, wishing he could reach across the table to him. But oftentimes a table is as vast as the infinite Pacific seas. He pulls his hand back and looks out at the mindless scenery rushing by. It's odd that he feels so pensive when he is homeward bound. He chooses not to think of why. All he knows is that…all he knows…all he knows. No words come. All he knows is that he knows nothing at all.


	5. Islands

New Orleans, murmurs a voice. New Orleans, New Orleans. He hears it only vaguely. It comes muffled by dreams. He has been drifting for a while now in the lightest of sleeps, one troubled still by happenings in the outside world. They come to him slowly and confusingly in half-thoughts and incoherent sensations. He longs for a heavy, dreamless slumber, one to crush him and bury him and seal him away. He needs a good night's sleep. But he'll settle for this. He'll settle for most anything now.

New Orleans, it whispers, and it pulls him out. He clutches desperately at the last threads of sleep, but they've melted away into the stuffy air. Still he leans against the window with his arms crossed and eyes closed. There's nothing out there that interests him as much as sleep. Even the rolling fields and idyllic towns that rush by seem to him like a reel of film. Untouchable. Unreal. The marines scattered about in their tidy uniforms, the soft seats and hot food, the pretty girls in their Sunday best. All of it, artificial. They are less real than the wisps of dreams floating in his mind. He can hardly bear to look at them.

New Orleans, it says again, louder, as if trying to wake him, trying to shake the sleep from his shoulders and the dreams from his eyes. Shut up, he thinks, and buries deeper into himself. From across the table comes the sounds of shuffling.

Snafu gets up from his seat, stretches his arms and cracks his knuckles. He hears every last sound. Then silence. He can feel Snafu's eyes boring into him. They're no different here on a well-lit train than in a hysterical tropical night. He sees Snafu standing before him, looking ridiculous in a clean uniform and sporting a freshly shaved chin. He sees him hesitating, gazing down upon him with those ocean eyes. Who knows what Snafu thinks of in that lonely corridor in that lonely night.

Night is night, Eugene realizes, whether it be in Peleliu or Okinawa or seeping through the window of a train at its New Orleans stop. And a corridor lined both sides by comrades is the loneliest place on earth. He knows because he feels it too. As he sits here, an arm's reach away from a man he had almost ventured to call a friend, he is vaguely aware of a great distance between them, a great ocean pulsing and pushing and churning away.

Wake up, Sledgehammer, comes the silent plea. It enrages him somehow. My name's Eugene, he thinks furiously. Call me Eugene. Eugene Sledge. But the name feels foreign already in his mind and he knows that if he opens his mouth, his tongue would trip and mangle it helplessly.

Wake up, Sledgehammer. But he refuses to gaze into the ocean before him. Even so, the eyes peer at him in the darkness of his blank mind. He begs for images, pulls for memories, anything, everything, to cover them up. Nothing.

Who knows what oceans think of in the night. There's the rage and the foam and a diabolical fury. There's an awful, unceasing mystery in its depths. But beneath all the terrors of vast eternity, there lies a deep melancholy that broods in the dark. It shines to him like a mirror, and he shudders at every glance. So he screws his eyes tighter shut and folds his arms all the more defensively about himself. He's had enough of oceans for a lifetime. He never wants to see another drop of water again.

Wake up, Sledgehammer. He knows Snafu is there still, standing in the corridor. Go away, he thinks. Let me sleep. He just needs some fucking sleep. Sledgehammer. My name's Eugene. Sledgehammer. Let me sleep. Sledgehammer. Fuck you.

He can almost see Snafu nodding, as if he had known from the start there would be no waking him. He swings his bag over his shoulder and turns away, a small smile lingering on his lips. He hesitates for one last moment, but it's a fleeting moment and an empty hope. It's gone before it forms. Footsteps fade into the distance. They are swallowed by the New Orleans night.

When he opens his eyes again, they are blurred and heavy and nearly miss the small white box sitting across the table from him. A pack of cigarettes. He reaches over cautiously and turns it over a few times in his hands. His thumb traces the edges lightly. He brings it to his nose and sniffs it once, delicately. Lovingly, you could say. It comes to him slowly.

Nothing but the usual cigarette smells at first, wafting warm and comforting into his nose. But then comes the unmistakable smells of war – mud, blood, gunpowder, sweat. And then it rushes at him, a raging tide. Vomit. Vomit everywhere. He's suffocating. He loosens his tie frantically and peels away at the buttons of his shirt. He gulps in massive mouthfuls of air, but to no avail. He's drowning in vomit.

In a sudden fit of regret, he springs up in his seat and jams his face against the window. The train pulls away slowly. But he fights it, running wildly down the corridor, tripping over other passengers and knocking over plates. A roar of protests follows in his wake, but no matter. He presses his nose against the very last window and squints desperately into the dark.

But Snafu's gone, lost in an endless tide of men. They pull him along, and Eugene thinks briefly of him stepping off the platform and into the crowd, perhaps following blindly and carelessly the man in front of him. He finds a sad beauty in such utter aimlessness.

The train has picked up speed by now and skims along the rails. Still he stares into the blurring dark. If he allows himself to wander with his mind for a moment, he finds himself dreaming of ships and the sea. He finds himself dreaming of being borne away, away from an island bleeding death, across an ancient, ever-flowing sea. If he just squints a little more, he can barely make out a speck on the edge of night. Further and further he is borne, and it fades away into nothingness. There's no hope of finding Snafu now. He's left him on the island and sailed away. His eyes feel weary in their sockets. He turns back down the corridor and towards his seat, muttering apologies along the way.

He sits back down and takes out a single cigarette. Gingerly, he sniffs it again. Vomit. He takes out another. Vomit. Another and another and another. Vomit, all of them. It isn't possible, he knows. It just isn't possible for any scent to linger that long. It's impossible that Snafu would still have the cigarettes he carried in Peleliu. He smokes like a chimney. They should have been gone by the next morning.

He lights one. Smoke envelopes him like an old friend. He closes his eyes and takes a long drag, relishing the feel of it filling up his lungs. He exhales and allows himself to drift away with it. It's impossible, he tells himself, all of it. He must have dreamt of the scent of vomit. He must have dreamt up all of it.

He gazes out the window and smokes greedily. He thinks he sees Snafu for a moment standing by the tracks. Got a smoke? Eugene avoids his eyes. Fuck you, Sledge. Just shut up, Shelton. But it's only a trick from an exhausted mind, a puff of smoke floating, already gone. Empty night and nothing more. He gazes steadily into the endless dark and watches as it swallows Snafu up.

The dark comes in waves. It ebbs and flows and drags him down. The eyes linger long after the rest of him is gone, but at length even they are borne away. He wonders if they were fixed on him till the very end. He reaches for another cigarette, but he's smoked them all. No matter. There would have been no way to give them to Snafu anyway, standing so far divided by such a great abyss.

He tucks the empty pack away and rests his head against the window. His eyes close at last into sleep, weighed down by his inner pocket and the unbearable lightness it holds. Outside, the night rushes by. In an hour or a day or a year it'll be gone. He'll sleep till then.


End file.
